More Missouri districts could struggle under new system

New state projections show more Missouri school districts would have their accreditation come under extra scrutiny under a new evaluation system.

The state ran the projections in preparation for switching this upcoming academic year to a new, more academically demanding version of the Missouri School Improvement Program.

The new accreditation system won't produce its first official batch of results until 2013. But if the new standards were applied to 2011 data, 57 of the state's 521 districts would have fallen in the provisionally accredited or unaccredited range, up from 21 districts under the old system.

Falling in the unaccredited or provisionally accredited range doesn't automatically lead to a change in a district's accreditation classification. The state works with struggling districts and reviews several years of data first.